CHAPTER FIVE — MR. GREY

Aria | Three Weeks Later

The wall has marks on it.

I notice them every morning now. Four pale rectangles where the paint held differently underneath—Slightly brighter, slightly protected—because something used to hang there and doesn’t anymore. You can see exactly where the edges were. The precise shape of what I removed.

I should repaint over them.

I haven’t.

I don’t know why I haven’t. Maybe because it would require acknowledging that I’m looking at them, and I have been very committed, these past three weeks, to not acknowledging things.

I roll onto my back and look at the ceiling instead.

My phone buzzes.

“Okay so,” Zara says, without preamble, “I’m going to need you to explain something to me.”

“Good morning to you too.”

“I am in the middle of something very important and I need answers.” The sound of her eating something. Cereal, probably. Zara eats cereal at all hours of the day with the dedication of someone who has fully committed to one lifestyle choice. “There is a magazine on my kitchen table. My mum left it. And there is a man on the cover of this magazine who I need you to account for.”

I know exactly what magazine.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say.

“Aria.”

“Zara.”

“The man on this cover.” More cereal sounds. Deliberate. Theatrical. “Tall. Dark. Looks like God got bored of making regular people and decided to show off. Forbes. The tagline says ‘The Architecture of Power.’ My mum has circled his face with a red pen. My mother, Aria. Fifty-two years old. Red pen.”

I press my free hand over my eyes.

“He’s my father’s business partner,” I say. “You know who he is.”

“Don’t I know. I know who he is. I went to every single one of your birthday parties growing up. I have seen this man in a dark suit approximately nine hundred times.” A pause. “That is not the same as being prepared for this.” The magazine apparently makes a sound when she slaps it. “They used the word formidable four times. Four, Aria. That’s not a profile, that’s a warning.”

“Zara—”

“Did you tell him?”

The ceiling is very white.

“Tell who what,” I say.

“Do not do this to me before nine in the morning.” Her voice shifts — not teasing anymore, the version underneath it, the one that has known me since we were eleven and sharing a desk in the back of a classroom and passing notes about everything we couldn’t say out loud. “Did you tell him.”

I take a breath.

“No,” I say.

A beat.

“Aria—”

“I changed my mind,” I say. The words come out clean, which surprises me a little. I have been practicing them in my head since the bathroom floor, and apparently the practice has worked, because they come out sounding like something I believe rather than something I am learning how to believe. “I thought about it and I realized I just… I’d built something up in my head. It wasn’t real. I was eighteen and it was all very dramatic and I’m over it.”

Zara is quiet.

This is more alarming than when Zara is talking.

“Okay,” she says, finally.

“It’s fine.”

“I said okay.”

“You said it in the voice you use when you don’t believe me.”

“I said it in the voice I use when I love you too much to argue with you before nine in the morning.” Another beat. “Is it actually fine?”

I look at the wall.

At the pale rectangles.

“Yes,” I say. “Genuinely. It’s — you know how things feel enormous when you’re inside them and then you get some distance and you realize it was always going to be this way? It’s like that.”

More quiet.

“Okay,” she says again, softer. “I love you.”

“I love you.”

“Also—” and the teasing version is back, the easy version, the one that means she has accepted the redirect for now — “if you ever reach a point where you are completely, one hundred percent, hand-on-heart, no-asterisks finished with this man—”

“Zara—”

“I’m just saying. For the greater good. He should not be walking around being a public health hazard if no one is doing anything about it. It would be civic-minded—”

“I’m hanging up.”

“I’m just saying!”

“Bye, Zara.”

“You love me.”

I hang up.

I look at the wall.

The pale rectangles look back.

I sit up.

The room is the same room it has always been. 

Blinding peach and white aesthetic. My desk, my bookshelf, the window with the good light in the morning that I have been waking up to my whole life. 

My things exactly where they are — except for the four places on the wall that are slightly brighter than everything around them, and the thing on the floor of my wardrobe that I have been carefully not opening the wardrobe to look at.

I open the wardrobe.

He is sitting at the bottom, behind my winter boots. Slightly lopsided from the night I threw him. One ear almost fully detached, the seam along his left side split open, the stuffing visible. A small grey rabbit who has been through something and shows it.

I pick him up.

He is lighter than I remember. Or I am bigger.

I brought him everywhere when I was small. He slept beside me. He traveled in my school bag, which my mother pretended not to notice because she understood, I think, what it was like to have a thing that carried your secrets. He was there the night I cried myself to sleep after the Pemberton gala and could not explain why, even to myself. He was there the night of my fourteenth birthday when I understood, for the first time, that wanting something so completely and having no power over whether you got it was one of the specific cruelties of being alive.

Adrian brought him back from a trip.

I was six. He had been gone for three weeks — some contract, somewhere that required his presence, and I had waited for him the way I waited for everything when I was six, with the patient absolute certainty that the waiting would end because it always did.

He came through the door on a Thursday evening and he crouched down — all that height folding itself down to my level — and he held out a bag and inside the bag was a grey rabbit with a bow that was already slightly crooked, and he said: “I found him in a market. He looked like he needed somewhere to be.”

I called him Mr. Grey immediately and Adrian said that was a very serious name for a rabbit and I said he was a very serious rabbit and Adrian had looked at me with something in his face that was warm and a little complicated, and then he said: “fair enough.”

Mr. Grey had needed somewhere to be.

He had been with me ever since.

Until three weeks ago, when I ripped off his ear.

I sit down on the floor with him in my lap and I find my sewing kit in the drawer and I start, carefully, to put him back together.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him. “That wasn’t about you.”

He is a stuffed rabbit. He doesn’t answer. But he has always been good at listening.

“He gave you to me,” I say. Quieter. Threading the needle. “That’s his thing, you know. He pays attention and then he gives you the exact right thing at the exact right moment and you think it means something and maybe it did mean something but not the something you thought.”

Stitch.

“The wall looks terrible,” I tell him. “The rectangles. I should paint over them but that would mean buying paint and probably asking Dad to help and then he’d ask why and I’d have to say I redecorated and he’d ask why I redecorated and—”

Stitch.

“You’re very easy to talk to,” I say. “This is why I kept you for twelve years.”

I do the ear last. It takes longer than the seam. When I’m done I hold him out and look at him — slightly lopsided, slightly repaired, recognizably himself.

I hug him once.

The way you hug things that have kept your secrets.

“The giver did something,” I tell him, against the grey fabric. “You didn’t. You can stay.”

I put him on the bookshelf.

Then I stand up, and I get in the shower, and I start getting ready for the day.

Zara wants to go to the new wine bar on Clement Street that her cousin says is worth the price and the queue. We’ve been planning this for two weeks. I have an outfit I bought specifically for tonight because I am trying — very deliberately, very intentionally — to have things I bought specifically for things that have nothing to do with anyone except me and Zara.

My mother is in the kitchen when I come downstairs.

“You look beautiful,” she says, with the specific maternal satisfaction of a woman whose daughter is going out on a Saturday night and looks like someone who is going somewhere good.

“Thank you, Mum.” I kiss her cheek. “I learned from the best.”

“Flatterer.”

“It’s true.”

She holds my face in her hands for a second, the way she has done since I was small — just holding it, looking at me, doing the thing she does where she reads me like a document she wrote and knows every line of. Whatever she finds, she keeps to herself.

“Eleven,” she says. “Clement Street is twenty minutes. You don’t need to close it down.”

“Eleven,” I agree.

“Eleven means eleven, Aria.”

“I know what eleven means.” 

My father appears from the hallway. He is in his Sunday clothes, which means he is either going somewhere or he has been comfortable long enough that he has changed into the clothes that exist only for being comfortable in. He looks at me.

“Where are you going?” he says.

“Wine bar with Zara.”

“Which one.”

“Clement Street.”

He makes the face he makes when he is deciding how many things to say. He settles on: “If I find anybody near my house or near you who has not been vetted, evaluated, and personally assessed by me—”

“Dad—”

“I will trim their legs,” he says. “Not all the way. Just enough.”

“Enough to what?”

“Enough,” he says, with enormous dignity, “to make a point.”

I kiss his cheek. He holds me for a moment — that specific warmth, the solid anchor of him — and then he lets me go and adjusts his collar and pretends he was not just threatening to commit violence on my behalf.

“Eleven,” he says.

“I know.”

I pick up my bag.

And that is when I see Adrian.

He is in the sitting room doorway. He must have arrived while I was upstairs — he and my father do this sometimes on Saturdays, review something, talk through whatever is coming the following week. He is in dark clothes, his jacket over his arm, and he looks the way he always looks — the specific, immovable presence of a man who belongs wherever he is standing.

He is looking at me.

Not the assessing glance from last Sunday. Not the managed version. He is just — looking. For the fraction of a second before the management arrives and passiveness reassembles itself, he is simply looking at me the way you look at something when you have forgotten to not look at it.

Then it is gone.

“Going out?” he says. The voice. Exactly right.

“Wine bar,” my father says, before I can answer. 

“Twenty minutes away. Eleven o’clock. I have given the relevant warnings.”

“Mm,” Adrian says.

One word.

I watch his jaw. The specific tightening of it — barely, almost nothing. The kind of thing you see only if you have spent years learning the terrain of someone’s face.

I see it.

I pick up my bag.

“Good night,” I say.

To my father. To my mother, who appears from the kitchen with the dish towel. To the room.

Not to him specifically.

Not to him.

I walk out into the evening.

It is cool and light and the street is alive with people going somewhere, and I put in my earphones and I start walking toward Clement Street, and I do not think about the way he was looking at me.

I think about what I am wearing and how cute the dress is and that Zara will have something to say about my shoes and that the research group orientation is on Monday and I still need to email Professor Harland and that Mr. Grey is on my bookshelf now looking slightly repaired.

I do not think about Adrian.

I get half a block before I realize I am smiling.

Not at anything.

Just…at the night. At the cool air. At the particular feeling of walking somewhere that is mine, toward someone who is mine, wearing something I chose because I wanted to.

Just that.

I keep walking.